Successes:

We implemented the character movement successfully, including some special abilities, "spindash", "home attacking". We also added the lock-on for the player to focus the closest enemy. Designed levels with upward and downward slopes as well as ramps to fit the momentum-based gameplay that Sonic embodies. The fundamental requirement for this game was met successfully.

Challenges:

The home attack and spindash were difficult to program. For the home attack, sometimes, the main character can only go for a short distance and after hitting the first enemy, it would have problem focusing on next enemies. Also, when the character is in home attack state, it was sometimes hard to reach enemies that were placed higher or lower. For the spindash,  trying to keep the main character in this state was a challenge; when the dash is charging up while you spin, and the button is released to activate the dash, it only moved a short distance. 

Trying to make the sprite sheet work in unity is also a big problem because we never designed a 2D game before, whereas the time spent to focus on designing good quality sprites took away from the learning experience of grasping how Unity works with programming 2D gameplay.

Lastly, one of the great challenges was debugging build errors, since so many errors are ignored in the Unity editor, it was difficult having to go back and forth between the editor to fix bugs and then re-building the game again as its not obvious what errors will occur until you playtest the build. 

What we learned:

Before discussing the fundamentals we learned, it was also important to talk about going through the challenges. A lot of the issues with the control scheme, especially the variability of the homing attack, came from improper implementation of the ability. The source of our issue was an incorrect equation when determining how the player should travel towards the enemy, and after many different edits we had discovered a much simpler way to properly determine the correct direction that the player needed to travel in for the homing attack. Not only that, but with this discovery was also how we determined the correct way to implement the spindash, which wasn't given enough force to be substantial for player use.

We learned about how to make a fast-paced action platformer, how to make sprite sheets and add the animation to it in unity. We gained the knowledge about how to program a character's movement that is built on speed and gaining or maintaining momentum, as well as abilities like the spindash and homing attack.  We learned how to implement the enemy AI with projectiles and how they can be used as targetable objects that the player locks on to. We also learned the difference between the performance of the game in the Unity editor, versus the final build. It was clear that for future revisions or projects, more time needs to be set aside just to build the game.

Possible future revisions:

1. Add some bosses in for future levels. Possibly a fire-based boss to fit the ice vs. fire theme.

2. More types of enemy behaviors, such as enemies following you, attacking you other than shooting, or moving to different locations on the platform.

3. Add powerups, like making the snowball grow into a snowman.

4. Add more detailed animations and backgrounds that resemble different winter-based setting. Could also remove the legs from the snowman's character design since it's not particularly used for anything as the animations mainly focus on the character being a ball. Also add designs to the platforms in the levels. 

5. Expand levels to have more interactions with the player, such as loop-the-loops like in Sonic, and moving platforms which are commonly seen in platforming games.